and hiding the stumps with which the plain was covered, while far away, to right and left, the prospect was bounded by forest walls, and gloomy bulwarks and parapets of pines arose in front, as if designed, in their perfect denseness, to exclude the world from some bosky Garden of Paradise beyond.  Not so, however; for our pathway squeezes itself between two melancholy sentinel-pines, tracing its white scroll into the forest farther than the eye can follow, and in a few moments we leave the clearing behind, and pass into the shadow of the endless avenue, and bow beneath the trailing branches of the silent, stern, immovable warders at the gate.  We were fairly in the Pines; and a drive of somewhat more than three miles lay before us still.

The immense forest region I had thus entered covers an extensive portion of Burlington County, and nearly the whole of Ocean, beside parts of Monmouth, Camden, Atlantic, Gloucester, and other counties.  The prevailing soils of this great area—­some sixty miles in length by ten in breadth, and reaching from the river Delaware to the very shore of the Atlantic—­are marls and sands of different qualities, of which the most common is a fine, white, angular sand, of the kind so much in request for building-purposes and the manufacture of glass.  In such an arid soil the coniferae alone could flourish, and accordingly we find that the wide-spreading region is overgrown almost entirely with white and yellow pine, hemlock, and cedar.  Hence its distinctive appellation.

It was a most lovely afternoon, warm and serene as only an American autumn afternoon knows how to be; and while we hurried past the mute, monotonous, yet ever-shifting array of pines and cedars, the very rays of the sun seemed to be perfumed with the aroma of the fragrant twigs, about which humming-birds now and then whirred and fluttered as we startled them, scarcely more brilliant in color than the gorgeous maples which grew in one or two dry and open spots.  For three-quarters of an hour our drive continued, until at length a slight undulation broke the level of the sand, and a fence, inclosing a patch of Indian corn, from which the forest had been driven back, betokened for the first time the proximity of some habitation.  In fact, having reached the summit of the slope, I found myself in the centre of an irregular range of dwellings, scattered here and there in picturesque disregard of order, and next moment my hand was grasped by my friend B. I had reached my destination,—­Hanover Iron-Works,—­and was soon walking up, past the white gateway, to the Big House.